So this is something I just had spring up in my head; if you look at the market right now, it's somewhat in a stalled rut when it comes to the revenue and profit growths analysts and market watchers would like to see, or think we should be seeing. And with various high-profile games either underperforming or just bombing altogether in record time (like Concord), out goes hundreds of millions of dollars with each and every last one of them.
There seems to be a thought from analysts that when GTA6 releases, it will perform so magnificently that the industry will in itself be "saved". Things will return to the upswing, and we'll see a huge explosion in sales for consoles, specifically the PS5. To them this success is guaranteed, so all the market needs to do is patiently wait until a year from now.
But what if they're all wrong? In fact, what if GTA6 underperforms or overperforms so much that either way, the market just spirals into mass disarray barring a few exceptions (i.e Nintendo)? I know this sounds crazy, but let me stick some meat on these bones.
[GTA6 UNDERPERFORMS]
-This rests on the idea that GTA6 doesn't end up repeating GTA5's massive 200+ million in lifetime sales, or doesn't reach likely expected milestones quickly enough (i.e tracks more than 30% behind GTA5 when launch-aligned). There are a few reasons to actually consider this as a non-zero possibility:
1: RELEASE TIMING. GTA5 released at the ass-end of 7th gen for two consoles which saw strong B2P activity in GTA's main markets, the PS3 and 360. Between them, there were ~ 180 million units sold by that point (though a lot dual-console owners, so unique user numbers maybe closer to 140-145 million).
GTA6 is releasing little over halfway into a current console generation, on a PS5 that will likely be around 80-something million by then, and an Xbox Series S/X around ~ 32-33 million realistically. That's a total of about 112-113 million between them, but with a decent chunk of dual-platform owners the unique user count would be closer to ~ 86 million. Much smaller than 360/PS3.
More an issue, though, is that on Xbox, the B2P buying rate has dropped significantly. A game like GTA6 could be an exception to that trend, particularly in the US (GTA's biggest market), but even here Xbox is lagging severely behind PlayStation, to the point where any exception probably wouldn't be enough when compared to the B2P buying audience for 360 just two generations ago in the same country.
All of these factors could likely contribute to lower sales pace for GTA6 vs GTA5.
2: DIFFERENT MARKET. Back when GTA5 released, and for its first few years, there weren't many other massive GAAS-type platforms around. You had Minecraft, you had World of Warcraft, you had League of Legends and those were I'd say the Big 3. Even so, most of the audience for those games were kind of in their own bubbles/slices and typically didn't gravitate to games like GTA anyway.
All this meant that among the core demographics GTA5 could sell to, there weren't many if any games between them that ate away at their gaming time and money. One of the few comparable IP that gen was COD, but it was an annual release, not quite seen as a platform, and cross-platform didn't exist at the time (inevitably limiting total player tools, artificially capping play engagement for communities across platforms). There also weren't a glut of open-world games cramming in 100 hours' worth of content (yet).
It's not like that anymore. Nowadays you've got Fortnite, Apex, VALORANT, Counterstrike, DOTA, Overwatch, Diablo, Minecraft, PUBG, Geshin, WoW, ESO, FF XIV just to name a few. Each of these on their own are huge time-sinks, and also compete to attract as many purchases from gamers as possible. Then you've got epics like Elden Ring, HFW, Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth Wukong, FF VII Rebirth etc. releasing regularly year over year, asking for many dozens or even hundreds of hours from players between the each of them.
There's only but so much time and money people can make do with, so overall player activity is a lot more "busy" between a very narrow band of games than even little over ten years ago. Keep this point about player time & money relative to that spread over a narrow band of games in mind: I'll be tying that into the flipside of how it can be detriment if GTA6 is TOO successful, as well. In any case, GTA6 has more to compete with than GTA5 had back in 2013, not just in total number of games but in particular, the number of games that themselves eat up hundreds or thousands of hours and money from their players.
Combine that with the crossover effect: nowadays many of the same people who'd play a GTA, an Elden Ring, a Hogwarts etc. are also playing one or more of those massive GAAS titles I just mentioned above. Rarely does a gamer's time allotment budget increase the older they get, so it's not hard to see where the complications start to enter the picture.
With that laid out, now to answer the question: what happens if GTA6 does in fact underperform too much when launch-aligned with GTA5? Well, here are what I think are things which'd transpire:
1: STOCK PANIC. Many investors and shareholders are both impatient and idiotic, so they'd react by causing shares to take a big drop. Not just for T2, but for all the big games companies (at least those in the West reliant on GTA6's performance). That'd inevitably include Sony and Microsoft, but other big platforms like Nintendo wouldn't be affected. Some other big publishers might, though, like EA and Ubisoft.
2: MISSED PS5 SALES TARGETS. No doubt at this point Sony are banking on GTA6 to help catapult PS5 sales into the second half of the gen, and either help them pass PS4 launch-aligned, or get as close to matching PS4 launch-aligned as possible. There is a small-but-noticeable gap between PS5 and PS4 that's been growing (in PS4's favor) the past two fiscal quarters, something Sony would like to see not happen. While I don't think they plan any price cut for PS5 (or the Pro) anytime before GTA6, softer-than-expected GTA6 market performance could be what pushes them into doing said price cuts.
I'd also think that such would make them reach out to T2 for some PS5/GTA6 bundles (I don't expect these at launch). As for Xbox....well, what really of it? Yeah GTA6 could give a small bump to hardware sales even if it underperformed, but I'll put it this way: any amount in terms of market performance Sony'd need from the game to keep PS5 sales steady or see big growth, Microsoft would probably need four times that just to see Series number return to "normal" Xbox rates (normal as in peak XBO or near-peak 360 sales rates in the US).
The only other way Microsoft could see a boost in hardware sales via GTA6 is if they put out their rumored next-gen hardware in H1 2026, and enjoy some brief period (6-8 months) with the definitive version of the game on the market before the inevitable PC port (Fall 2026). Though if they're lucky, T2 could prioritize a Switch 2 release somewhere during that brief 6-8 month period, which would probably push a PC port further out into Early 2027.
3: INVESTOR PULLOUT. Probably worst than a stock panic, the ramifications of an underperforming GTA6 could cause frightened investors to withdraw from various other game development projects, if they sense weak growth potential in the market. This could include both games we already know of, and many others that have yet to be announced. Some of this would inevitably also affected high-end AAA game development across several big companies, which could impact time-to-market, quality, scope, or a combination of the three.
All of this in turn could lead to a domino effect of game cancellations big and small, plus studio closures, not to mention surges in displaced workers without industry jobs. To put it mildly, it could lead to a clusterfck.
[GTA6 OVERPERFORMS]
-I need to specify what "overperforms" means in this context: with GTA6, overperformance would be anything 25% or higher (especially 35%+) versus GTA5 when launch-aligned, over a sustained period of time well beyond the launch year. While there are quite a few factors which can lead to a market overperformance, most people are probably at least vaguely aware of what those factors are, so I'll just jump straight to the potential consequences of such. However, there's one thing I want to throw out there:
>GTA6 is not just a game; it's a platform.
Much like a Fortnite, I think it's fair to say at this point that GTA6, like what GTA5 became, will be seen as a platform unto itself. This is in large part due to the GTA Online component, which may or may not make it to launch (probably not), but will definitely add longevity to the game well beyond the campaign's completion. This combined with the very strong evergreen B2P potential for GTA6 itself could very well make it the defacto #1 games software platform in the market, and comfortably so.
However, if you read what I was saying above about the "narrow band" of games (mainly GAAS platforms) occupying huge amounts of time and money, well...that is about to show its ugly side in this section. So anyway, on with the market results from an overperformance by GTA6:
1: HOARDING THE MONEY. When I see these analysts talk about GTA6 market performance in the context of uplifting the market, they never say that the vast majority of that money is T2's. And rightfully so: it's their game, it's their IP. But that should put into context what part of the market is truly benefiting from something like GTA6, when it comes to unit and software revenue sales anyway.
The way some people go about it, you'd think that uplift is evenly split among all the big companies and publishers, but it isn't. This just contributes to a phenomenon we've been seeing for the past decade or so, where the vast majority of the market's revenue and profits are coming from just a small selection of the publishers within that same market. With things like consolidation I guess this was just bound to happen, but it still means that any uplift for other platforms or software would depend on a confluence of other variables tied to GTA6 which are completely outside the hands of anyone but T2.
And even there, in a few instances even T2 can't fully control everything.
2: MARKET DEPENDENCY. So should GTA6 significantly outperform GTA5 in the market, this will just create even more pressure on T2 and R* to more or less "carry the industry" as far as revenue, profits, and growth are concerned. Putting all of these expectations on a single dev, a single pub, a single IP, a single game...it can't be healthy in the long term. This dependency can also lead to some other negative trends such as...
3: INVESTMENT HOMOGENEITY. We could see a sea of investors start demanding that their money only go towards more games chasing after the GTA pie; this probably wouldn't create as much a problem as the GAAS trend we saw take into effect a few years back, but it could still be something of a repeat of the early-mid '00s where we saw a ton of GTA competitors and clones spring up.
Unlike back then, however, a combination of modern-era investor greed, short-sightedness and political influences could result in a surge of knockoffs with none of the charisma or creative differentials of the competitors back in the past, so if any one of those clones fail, the ramifications would be far bigger.
4: SALES SUPPRESSION (VACUUM EFFECT). GTA6, regardless of market performance, is going to at the very least be a BIG deal. Even games of known brand name and big appeal releasing next to it may have a tougher time than usual, to say nothing of smaller titles or new IP.
But a GTA6 that strongly performs above GTA5 launch-aligned, and over a long period of time, will likely have a vacuum effect on the sales cap of various other games, cutting down the peak of their sales potential. Thankfully, this one actually may not be TOO bad, in part because GTA Online isn't planned to launch Day 1 alongside the normal game (based on what we know so far). This means that any such vacuum effect would only be WRT money, rather than player time compounding on money.
That said, a strongly overperforming GTA6 could extend this type of "vacuum" effect both in intensity and duration, relative the rate of market overperformance. As I doubt any of this would cause a delay in the planned rollout for GTA Online 2 (or whatever "next-gen" think is done for GTA Online), this just creates a problem that takes longer to wind down, only to be re-strengthened and amplified once the online component goes live.
5: MARKET FALLOUT. So now we finally come to the big one. Ironically, a strong overperforming GTA6 would, IMO, lead to some of the same negative effects as if it were to harshly underperform. In particular, I think we would still see the issue of diminished sales for various other games (maybe not all of them, though), lower spend in software for the console software market outside of the top games & big publishers, leading to lack of investment opportunities for said games and, eventually, more layoffs & studio closures.
"But how can this be", you ask? Well, it's simple. Again: GTA isn't just a game; it's a platform.
When you look at a lot of the industry's revenue and profits today, you see that a huge chunk of it is actually coming from GAAS or better to say in this case, very specific GAAS that have become platforms unto themselves. Games like Fortnite, Minecraft, WoW, League, COD, etc. are pulling in a massive chunk of non-hardware/peripheral gaming revenue. This results in a big chunk of the gaming market's sustainability (at least in the core/non-mobile spaces) to rely on a handful of IP in a small section of genre types with specific services-orientated business models, under the ownership of the absolute largest publishers, who represent at best 5-10% of the total publishers and developers in the same market sector.
One way to picture is to see these GAAS "platforms", and the publishers who own them, like the big banks. And you remember what happened with the big banks back in the late '00s, right? You remember how when even one of those big banks faltered, it threw the economy into a hellfire? Well, the gaming market of today is structured more or less just like that, and GAAS large enough to become platforms unto themselves have helped enable this in a way that wasn't the case in previous generations.
Now, yes, in prior gens you had publishers who might've still facilitated roles in the market analogous to the big banks, but they did this through a larger variety of shorter-experience (compared to GAAS and modern open-world) AAA and AA games. In other words, the more such games the publisher had, the more contingencies they had in case any one franchise fell off in sales & popularity. It'd take a lot of such failures to have that big publisher at risk, and with game costs, development & time being magnitudes lower even just two generations back, publishers were able to iterate on a franchise or put out new IP at a quicker pace to rebound for a failure.
Even a prolific AAA failure or two back 10+ years ago did not jeopardize a publisher's stability, or in most cases, the security of the studios either. The degree of what would have been called "unacceptable underperformance" was also more lenient back then, again due to games on average requiring much less money, time & manpower to develop. In some cases this resulted in games selling so many copies, and/or making so much in profit, that the margins were just absolutely massive compared to today, meaning more safety in market performance for those games.
Nowadays it's really nothing like that, again minus a few major publishers/platforms like Nintendo who are largely exempt from this discussion. So now supposing the market has a strongly performing (overperforming, even) GTA6 that's in itself its own platform, adding onto the narrow band of other games that are their own platforms...what games, devs and pubs do you think are going to suffer when spending dollar and gaming time sucked up by those small amount of titles, and those few publishers? Who do you think the big media are going to push in order to see the industry's financial stability & prosperity persist? What games and what publishers do you think investors will prioritize?
In all those cases, it's the smaller AA, indie, and even some of the more "niche" AAA games that will likely end up suffering. The major GAAS/live-service style "platform" games will hoover up more of the customer market's time & money, more of the investors' money & focus, more of the big publisher attention. Sure, we might see some breakouts still like a Black Myth Wukong, but those are going to be fewer and farer between, reliant on very specific demographics doing specific spending on titles that are in essence catered to them, in contexts where such games are seen as major breakthroughs in the industry one way or another. Needless to say, the confluence of factors enabling this don't coalesce together that often; it's a very rare phenomenon.
[SO WHAT'S THE ANSWER?]
If we're here saying GTA6 heavily underperforming or overperforming in the market could lead to some rather major consequences, then what's the goldilocks zone? Well, much like the classic tale, it's squarely in the middle. A GTA6 that performs just right in the market, is a GTA6 that's best for the market.
We shouldn't want a GTA6 that comes under market performance so much that it gives big swathes of the market a cold chill. Yet, we shouldn't want one that overperforms to the degree that platform holders & publishers become complacent, overburden it with too many duties, or sucks up most of the time & money of investors, publishers, even the gamers themselves. It's in finding the right balance what things R* and T2 do for the game to have it land just right, to do just enough for the market while avoiding the creation of lazy dependencies, while still hitting T2's own profits/revenue goals.
Provided they are sensible, of course. And in the context of this discussion, "sensible" IMO would mean within a -5% to + 10% variance launch-aligned & lifetime when compared to GTA5, in the areas of B2P sales, MTX sales, total revenue and total profits. But I'm interested to hear what the rest of you think about this. Do you think there's a chance GTA6 doesn't hit the high notes of GTA5 in market metrics, or do you feel it'll blow right past them? And, do you feel either would be a net positive or net negative unto the market as a whole? Let's hear some thoughts!
